The Mars Room Quotes

“A man could say every day that he wanted to change his life, was going to change it, and every day the lament became merely a part of the life he was already living, so that the desire for change was in fact a kind of stasis that allowed the unchanged life to continue, because at least the man knew to disapprove of it, which reassured him not all was lost.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Did you ever notice that women can seem common while men never do? You won’t ever hear anyone describe a man’s appearance as common. The common man means the average man, a typical man, a decent hardworking person of modest dreams and resources. A common woman is a woman who looks cheap. A woman who looks cheap doesn’t have to be respected, and so she has a certain value, a certain cheap value.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“The thing is you keep existing whether you have a plan to do so or not, until you don’t exist, and then your plans are meaningless.”
― Rachel Kushner , The Mars Room

“Things are more complicated than some can admit. People are stupider and less demonic than some can admit.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“The word violence was depleted and generic from overuse and yet it still had power, still meant something, but multiple things. There were stark acts of it: beating a person to death. And there were more abstract forms, depriving people of jobs, safe housing, adequate schools. There were large-scale acts of it, the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians in a single year, for a specious war of lies and bungling, a war that might have no end, but according to prosecutors, the real monsters were teenagers like Button Sanchez.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“No Tank Tops, the sign had said at Youth Guidance. Because it was presumed the parents didn’t know better than to show up to court looking like hell. The sign might have said Your Poverty Reeks.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“You would not have gone. I understand that. You would not have gone up to his room. You would not have asked him for help. You would not have been wandering lost at midnight at age eleven. You would have been safe and dry and asleep, at home with your mother and father who cared about you and had rules, curfews, expectations. Everything for you would have been different. But if you were me, you would have done what I did. You would have gone, hopeful and stupid, to get the money for the taxi.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Crazy people only lose their cunning last, if they ever lose it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“What I eventually came to understand, about San Francisco, was that I was immersed in beauty and barred from seeing it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you’ve betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Looking at someone who is looking at you was a drug as strong as any other.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Where people are gone the night falls upward, black and unmanned.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“As the first and only member of his family to pursue so-called higher education, maybe Gordon was prone to hypersensitivity. He had encountered people in graduate school who were eager to declare working-class pedigree, and they maybe had one parent with less education, or the family had been “poor,” but college-educated. Either way, if someone was insisting loudly on their own authentic origin, this was generally taken by Gordon as evidence they weren’t actually working-class. If they were from a background like Gordon’s, they would know to hide it, the way Gordon did, because the fact of his pioneering status was itself proof of just how tenuous his escape”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Another sign, NO TANK TOPS. Under it, typically, an entire three-generation family, all in tank tops, flesh spilling. And what was it about shoulders? What was law enforcement’s fear of shoulders?”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“It’s hard to live on the streets. In prison, you can be someone. Life has order if you know how to do time, and I know. I’m an expert. Living in a tent is a temporary thing. You do it until you go back to prison. That’s just how it works.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“Certain women in jail and prison make rules for everyone else, and the woman insisting on quiet was one of those. If you follow their rules, they make more rules. You have to fight people or you end up with nothing.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“I was assigned a public defender. We were all hopeful things would go differently. They did not go differently. They went this way.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“All the talk of regret. They make you form your life around one thing, the thing you did, and you have to grow yourself from what cannot be undone: they want you to make something from nothing. They make you hate them and yourself. They make it seem that they are the world, and you've betrayed it, them, but the world is so much bigger.

The lie of regret and of life gone off the rails. What rails. The life is the rails. It is its own rails and it goes where it goes. It cuts its own path. My path took me here.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“I can only know myself, if I can know anyone. I can only judge me.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“At the end of Th Brother's K, Alyosha asks the children to always remember the good feeling they share, in praising and celebrating the life of their beloved dead friend, the lost child.

Remember this always, Alyosha says, and he means, as an antidote. Retain the innocence of the most wholesome feeling you ever had in your life. Part of you stays innocent forever. That part of you is worth more than the rest.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“It was good to be a stranger in Los Angeles. It was bad to be a stranger in Los Angeles with the company of another stranger in a loud shirt.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“I was not likely to join a cult. That was not the danger I felt in glimpsing the feet of the dead, the bucket from which they drank. It was the proven fact, in the photographed feet, that you could drink death and join it.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“And if someone did remember them, someone besides me, that person’s account would make them less real, because my memory of them would have to be corrected by facts, which are never considerate of what makes an impression, what stays in the mind after all these years, the very real images that grip me from the erased past and won’t let go.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“... the inopportune mug shot available to all, especially in Florida and California, where they were uploaded by county clerks, making it seem as if a disproportionate share of screw-ups came from those states. The images were all the same: sour light and custodial formatting offset by the wild eyes and mussed hair of people yanked from life, arrested, numbered, ingested, and exposed.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“I block certain things out. Everyone does. It’s healthy.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“It’s okay to make a promise,” London said to Gordon, as if summarizing for the teacher how life actually worked, “but it’s not always a good idea to keep one.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“The neighbor next door to the ranch where Jimmy Darling stayed had emus. They sometimes got onto the property and wandered around. They were like people, violent and unpredictable, with brains the size of walnuts.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“It makes you feel good about yourself, especially in the beginning. It makes you feel good about other people. You want to give the whole world a break, a time-out, a tender regard. There”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“You can’t own someone for a dollar.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

“If you stayed there, sooner or later you were going to be visited at night by Russ, who was old, and muscular, and mean. The girls complained about being raped by him as if it were a form of strictness, or rent. They were willing to endure it because they didn't have other options. The rest of us did nothing about it because Russ bought us liquor and what were we to do, call the police? One of them was known for taking girls out to Point Lobos instead of to the police station.”
― Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room